


Dog Days Are Over

by Vera (Vera_DragonMuse)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, M/M, Running Away, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-13
Updated: 2013-06-13
Packaged: 2017-12-14 20:10:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/840898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vera_DragonMuse/pseuds/Vera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Run fast for your mother, run fast for your father</i><br/>Run for your children, for your sisters and brothers<br/>Leave all your love and your longing behind<br/>You can't carry it with you if you want to survive  - Florence + the Machines</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dog Days Are Over

**Author's Note:**

> For kiwiitin, who convinced me this pairing was a good idea.

It’s ludicrous to run away from home at twenty. It’s not even running away anymore. He had a car and enough money to keep him in shitty motel rooms. Even most of a college degree that would get him in the door of less self-respecting businesses. 

Anyone else would have said he finally got his head on straight and moved out. 

But Gabriel knew better. He’d run away as surely as he had at seven with his G.I. Joe suitcase rattling along next to him on the sidewalk. That first time, he had made it all the way to the playground three blocks away. He’d rested there for a bit, swinging by himself and thinking about the next stage of his journey. 

“What are you doing, little one?” Michael had appeared just as Gabriel had settled on McDonald’s to soothe his agitated stomach and his friend Balthazar’s house after that. 

“Running away.” Gabriel pumped his legs harder, churning further from the ground, away from the sturdy line of his brother’s back and his too compassionate, too pitying eyes. 

“It’s a large world out there.” Michael had held out his arms. “Come home for now. Run away when you’re a little bigger.” 

Gabriel had hesitated, caught between the sweet promise of freedom and the steady hard reality of Michael before him. 

“I don’t want to go home.” He told Michael. 

“So we won’t. Come on. Jump.” 

Gabriel lept. Not for one second did he think Michael wouldn’t catch him. At thirteen, his brother was already strong and broad at the shoulder. Already dependable as rock and twice as unflinching. For a brief moment, Gabriel flew. Weightless and caught between freedom and home. 

Michael had been true to his word that night. Taken Gabriel out for McDonalds and then to the movies with Michael’s paper route money. They watched two films right in a row. 

Gabriel was asleep when Michael carried him back into the house and he woke in his own bed. 

But he never forgot about running away. 

No one ever left the family house. It was cavernous enough that all of his brothers could live their own lives without losing the comfort of Father’s indulgent wealth. Women floated in and out, leaving behind marks of perfume and laughter before disappearing again. Gabriel grew and then stopped, inches below the towering pillars of his brothers. Yet he had more restlessness then all of them combined. 

He couldn’t say what broke him finally. Maybe it was their Father’s departure. He claimed it was a temporary stay in their Tuscan home, but those visits had gotten longer and longer. Without his stabilizing influence, their family turned to a pack of vicious lions that ripped at each other for dominance. 

Or maybe it was how Lucifer had begun to corner Gabriel at odd hours, a haunted look in his eyes. 

“I don’t know what to do, Gabby.” He would mutter, corralling Gabriel in his room with no hope of escape. 

“About what?” Gabriel would demand, too wound up to protest something as stupid as an old hated nickname. “What’s going on?” 

“I know a thing.” Lucifer told him. “A terrible thing.” 

“What thing?”

“If I tell, if I think too hard about it...” Lucifer whirled on him, eyes glassy. “It’s all coming to an end.” 

“Are you high?” Gabriel demanded. 

But he knew Lucifer wasn’t. Would never touch a drug or even a cigarette. He and Michael had always been big on bodily purity while Gabriel and Raphael put any stupid thing into their mouths and veins at least once. Sometimes twice just to be sure. 

“There’s a whole other-” Lucifer stopped. “You don’t want to know. Never mind.” 

Then he would leave, only to have the scene play out over the next day. 

Or maybe Gabriel had run because Michael had already left. Not the house, never that, but his work kept him away at all hours. It had started with med school, gotten worse during residency and caused a near complete disappearing act as he climbed the ranks at St. Mary’s Hospital. 

Or maybe Gabriel ran for the same reason he had when he was young enough to think all it took was a suitcase and six dollars: 

Because he could. Because it meant he was more than his family told him he was. Because the world was vast. Because Gabriel had been born with itchy feet. 

So, for his twentieth birthday, Gabriel gave himself a gift. It wasn’t like anyone else was going to do it. They’d stopped acknowledging such things years ago. He got his car road ready, threw all of the belongings that meant anything to him into the trunk and drove to California, leaving the grey coast of Maine behind forever. He drove with wild abandon. Without sparing a glance at a calendar. He was due to start college again at UCLA at the end of August, but that was months away. 

He stopped in a small town in Idaho because the local restaurant made a roast beef so perfect that it was worth eating for a week straight and threw saltpeter in the local perv’s beer. Then he meandered into Las Vegas where he met a beautiful boy named Jonah with eyes a liquid blue and hands that spoke elegantly in place of a long lost voice. Gabriel dawdled between his thighs and was mostly successful in not wishing he wore someone elses’ face. 

“Why are you so sad?” Jonah asked in a rapid fire of sign language. 

“I’m never sad,” Gabriel replied more haltingly, fingers still stumbling through it all, “only smiles.” 

Jonah kissed the edges of that ragged grin and asked nothing else. Not even when Gabriel left the next morning, leaving behind a thin clip of hundreds he’d won at the poker tables. 

It took a long time before Gabriel grew tired of wandering. He barely managed to show up for the first day of classes, sleeping in his car for a few days until he could find a place to live. The apartment was cramped, more a room with a half-moon bathroom and an island kitchen. There was trust fund money, but if he touched it then everyone would know where he had gone. So he subsisted on poker winnings and charmed his way into a job at a tabloid, writing articles about chupacabras and alien abductions. 

“Some if it’s real, you know.” Charlie told him as they wrote lies together, elbow to elbow. He loved the orange fall of her hair that weaved in and out of his peripheral vision as they worked. He loved her competence and the nerves that overlaid it. In another life, another realm, he could’ve loved her entirely. But they were both built wrong for that. 

“Which part? The one with guy haunted by his twin brother or the bit where vampire insides look like green jelly?” 

“Okay, none of that is, but I mean...some if it is. It has to be. Too many people witness this stuff. Maybe it’s just the left brain whispering to the right brain or something, but there’s got to be a grain of truth in it.” 

“Nah.” Gabriel replied with an ease he didn’t feel. “Smoke and mirrors. Real life is never that interesting.” 

Charlie was the only one that came over to his place. His school friends he met elsewhere, still pretending he was an average dorming student without a shady past. Charlie had her own secrets and she’d blitzed through school ages ago. The paper was a cover, he knew, for what illegal business he never bothered to ask. Instead, he gave up his bed to her one night a week on average, sleeping on the shitty couch after a movie binge. 

Life was, if not good, substantially better than it had been. He watched CNN one chilly Friday afternoon and tried not to care when Lucifer’s face flashed across the screen. ‘Scion Turns Back on Megacorporation’ scrawled over Lucifer's wild eyes. ‘Disappeared’ cropped up next. 

Gabriel hesitated over his phone, then bought a burner from an electronics store three towns over instead. Sent one text, 

‘R u ok? Need place to lie low? -G’ 

There was no reply for so long that Gabriel nearly forgot about it. The burner buzzed his pocket over a week later. 

‘Dad had second family. Cute kids. News at 11. Already low. Getting lower.’ 

‘You can stay with me.’ Gabriel fired off, but the phone never buzzed again. He reminded himself that being hurt was ridiculous. Who the hell wanted his rage fueled brother pacing the confines of a tiny apartment and terrorizing the life Gabriel had tried to build here? 

And yet. 

“Family.” Charlie said grimly and poured him another shot of tequila. 

“Yeah.” Gabriel snorted. “Fuck ‘em.” 

“If only it was that easy.” They clinked glasses, downed shots and bit down on lemons so sour that Gabriel’s mouth puckered for long minutes after. 

He wrote an article about the sudden hive death of bees, linking it to cell phones and microwaves. He aced all his finals, but calculus. But math could go fuck itself too. 

“What are you going to do for Christmas?” A girl in his Anthro class asked. 

“Drink myself into a coma.” He mumbled. 

He and Charlie drove to Mexico and woke up in a jail cell that he sweet talked them out of again while she managed to steal everything not nailed down in their offices. 

“What are you going to do with blank arrest reports in Spanish?” 

“The real question would be,” she reached across to change the radio stations, “what won’t I do with them?” 

New Year’s was easier. He found a raucous bar and made it louder with carefully applied moonshine. When the ball dropped, he dipping a willing waitress halfway to the floor and kissed her like there was no tomorrow. 

The next day, hung over and emptied, he wrote a story about sinkholes that swallowed whole towns because demons were fighting to get out from under the soil. It had thirty-seven typos, but there was no else in the office so it went to print just like that. 

“Did you make any resolutions?” A professor, so new he actually smiled at the beginning of a lecture, chimed. Everyone gives predictable answers and Gabriel had a quip ready. Yet when they reached him, it died on his tongue. 

“To do better.” He said instead though he didn’t know why. 

“Succinct.” Said the professor. “In the end, isn’t that what all resolutions are about?” 

Gabriel had no idea what he’d meant, but it had fit right in his mouth. He did study harder, brought his grades back up. He drank a little less, but not enough less that anyone really noticed. He stopped generating chaos just because he could. 

Some essential part of him had just...gone quiet. Waiting. Seeking. 

“There was a girl,” Charlie told him over guacamole on Valentine’s Day, “and she was like magic. You know? Some people can just make you feel that way.” 

“Yes.” Gabriel stabbed his chip down in the green gooze, watched it break in half under the weight. “I know.” 

He started volunteering at an animal shelter, taking dogs for long walks and cleaning litter boxes. A mutt with one dark eye took to him almost instantly, dancing whenever Gabriel came near. His apartment was too small for an animal and his life too ridiculous and random. 

“Thinks you hung the moon.” Another volunteer laughed, gap toothed. “That’s the best thing about dogs. They think everyone is a saint.” 

Gabriel wasn’t interested in sainthood. He took the dog home anyway. 

“What’re you naming him?” Charlie asked, hand held out tentatively and only relaxing when the dog licked at her palm, then nuzzled in for a petting. 

“Dunno. Previous owner called him Daffodil.” 

“Previous owner is a moron.” Charlie declared. “What about Bilbo? Oh! Or Smaug.” 

“He’s a dog, not a dragon.” Gabriel reached down, stroked his hand over coarse fur. The stubby white tail shook back and forth. “He looks more like a sheep.” 

“Shepard.” She declared. “Like Shepard Book!” 

“Shep.” Gabriel amended. 

Shep came with him everywhere. At first professors resisted, but Gabriel was persistent and Shep tended to destroy things when left alone for too long. After awhile, everyone forgot the dog was even there. Shep was quiet and preferred to sit between Gabriel’s feet where even the most doting co-ed couldn’t quite reach him. 

He took classes over the summer, kept Shep cool with ice cubes in his water while Gabriel shed layers as soon as he hit the door. The air conditioner in his apartment was intermittent at best. 

“Another year and I’m done.” 

“And what then?” Charlie circled his grammar errors in purple pen. The article was about monstrous dragonflies that could be mistaken for fey in the right light. He’d changed verb tenses three times. 

“Then I’ll get my Ph.D. Then I’ll teach. Stay in the ivory tower forever.” 

“Okay, Rapunzel.” She circled a dangling participle. “You go on waiting for that Prince.” 

“Don’t be ridiculous.” He pouted. “I’m self-actualized. I don’t need any man on a white steed.” 

“You’ve been watching way too much daytime television.” 

They changed things up and got arrested in Montreal for Christmas that year. Charlie got away with a gun, filing off the serial numbers in his car and leaving the metal shavings for him to find for weeks afterwards. 

He applied for graduate school and got in. The sun rose and set. He wrote a treatise on their secret alien overlords and another on cyborgs and another on the way the last chip was always broken at the bottom of a Pringles can. Shep made friends with a Golden Retriever named Denny and Gabriel made out with Denny’s owner, Alex. Dog and owner had shaggy hair and too much energy. They wore Shep and Gabriel down in a month and then they were gone. 

“Ugh.” Gabriel said to Shep after the harsh words had been said. 

“Whumph.” Shep agreed, head in Gabriel’s lap. 

Gabriel skipped graduation. He went to work instead, listening to the clatter of Charlie’s keyboard. When he’d graduated high school, no honors, unremarkable and middle of the pack, there’d been a formal family dinner. Exactly as stiff as it sounded. Afterwards, Michael had taken him out for ice cream like Gabriel was eight instead of eighteen. 

“I’d prefer a beer.” He’d groused. 

“No, you wouldn’t.” Michael replied simply, black bags under his eyes from too many nights spent cramming organic chemistry. “You want two scoops in a cone, sprinkles and peanut butter sauce. Whip cream.” 

“...maybe.” Gabriel had smiled begrudgingly. “But I’m getting rum raisin.” 

“Uh huh.” Michael had ordered for the both of them, his own a cup of strawberry untouched by extras. 

“You’re one shade away from being totally boring.” Gabriel informed him tartly. 

“I’m glad you finished.” Michael said serenely. “I’m proud of you.” 

“It’s just high school.” Gabriel licked at his cone, flushed with the praise. Thirsty for it like a desert flower resigned to constant parchness. 

“Still proud.” Michael leaned over, ruffling Gabriel’s hair. 

“Hey! Come on.” 

“It’s getting so long.” Michael let the last few locks fall through his fingers. “You’re...you’re nearly all grown up.” 

“Happens to everyone eventually.” He took a ruthless bite, waiting for the spike of cold induced pain. Anything to distract him from the unexpected tenderness, the long lean lines of Michael’s hand and the stifling warmth growing between them on the bench. 

“Sometimes...” Michael trailed off, strawberry melting into a pink puddle at the bottom of his cup. 

“Sometimes what?” Gabriel prodded. 

“It’s...I don’t know. I think you’re the best of us.” 

“Whatever. You’re the golden child.” 

“Am I?” Michael stirred and stirred, until it was only soup left. “Or am I just the one that follows orders the best?” 

“I think one leads to the other.” Gabriel shrugged. “And if it’s not you, then it’s Raphael. Or Lucifer even. I come in dead last.” 

“Because you’re looking at the wrong things. You just... know. You see through it all. You don’t put up with it.” 

“I do though.” Gabriel licked the stickiness from his fingers, stomach gone sour. “Or I would have left.” 

“What’s stopping you?” 

Maybe that was why Gabriel had left. That conversation just replaying over and over until he had to ask that question of himself every day. Until the answer was ‘nothing’. 

“Do you want to celebrate?” Charlie asked. 

“Yeah.” He smiled faintly. “Ice cream. My treat.” 

He got an insanely piled up cone with every topping. Charlie got a scoop of chocolate so dark it was nearly black and slathered it in Oreo crumbs. Shep got a taste of peanut butter ice cream and smacked his lips. 

“When I was a kid, I always got vanilla because it was safe, you know?” Charlie plunged in her spoon. 

‘“I ate wasabi ice cream once just prove I could.” He laughed at the memory though it hadn’t been funny then, his mouth burning and his determination not crack meaning he couldn’t stick his entire head under a useless faucet. Lucifer had teased him for days. 

He wrote an article about mysterious incidents at the end of rainbows and a woman who woke from a thirty year coma. He ate a block of wasabi cheese with Charlie that she bought at a fancy store down the street from their office, presenting it with a sleeve of crackers and a wink. He started graduate classes and wrote more serious papers about Descartes’ struggle with atheism and the dreamy prose of Jung. 

It wasn’t any particular day when Michael came at last. An autumn Tuesday with the sun burning L.A. bright and the first hint of Thanksgiving cropping up in store windows. Gabriel was walking home from work, Shep trotting along at his side until they reached the front door. The dog started barking, running around in circles like he usually only did for Gabriel. 

“Yeah, yeah, hamburger for dinner. How’d you know?” Gabriel laughed, got the door open. 

Shep charged up the stairs, tail wagging then stopped short in front of the apartment. There was a man sitting on the grimy carpet, back leaning against door. One elegant hand unfolded, offered up to Shep’s nose. 

Three years had changed Michael, describing still darker circles beneath his eyes. Perfectly quaffed dark hair had gone a little shaggy, hinting at disorder. He wasn’t wearing a suit or a tie or even a button down with the sleeves rolled up. Just a t-shirt and jeans, stripped back down to high school days. 

“Hi.” Gabriel choked out. 

“Hello.” Michael scratched tentatively between Shep’s ears. 

“So. You’ve found me.” 

“You weren’t lost.” Michael blinked once, slowly. “You’re right where you’re supposed to be.” 

“What does that mean?” Gabriel leaned over him to unlock the door, acutely aware of Michael’s damp warm breath on his thigh. 

“It means that you should let me in.” Michael nearly fell backward as the door opened out from behind him. 

“Don’t judge. I’m poor these days.” Gabriel stepped over him. 

Michael took in the apartment, then dismissed it. All that laser focus on Gabriel. 

“I’ve taken a job here.” 

“Oh. Um. Okay?” Gabriel set his keys down carefully. Bit a nail into his palm to check on the state of reality. Solid. “Good?” 

“It’s a good job.” Michael agreed. “Fewer hours, more money.” 

“Far away from home.” 

“Is it?” Michael reached out, took Gabriel’s hand. “I was hoping it’d be closer.” 

“How’d you even know I was here?” 

“Your articles. Picked up the paper by accident, but I’d know that style anywhere.” 

“You read that piece of shit?” Gabriel snorted. “What happened to you?” 

“Everything. Nothing.” He shook his head. “You heard about Father.” 

“Everyone heard. So?” 

“So...it changed things. Lucifer’s missing. Raphael spends all his time in a rage... I got married for six months just to get away. How stupid is that? Miserable for everyone.” Michael shuddered. “And I found that article and I knew you’d found your place.” 

“It’s just a tabloid. I’m working on my doctorate now.” Gabriel didn’t pull away, entranced by Michael’s hand curled around his. “What are you doing here really?”

“I’m sick of being unhappy.” Michael studied Gabriel’s face. “Can I crash on your sofa?” 

It should have been strange thing to suddenly have his brother as a roommate. It wasn’t. Shep took an instant liking to him, sometimes even abandoning his habitual spot at the foot of Gabriel’s bed to sleep on Michael’s stomach. They fell into new patterns, things they’d never had before. Michael cooked, for one. Uncomplicated good food with fresh vegetables in everything that he fed to Gabriel when they were both home at the same time. They took turns in the tiny shower, talking to each other through the curtain as the other brushed their teeth, combed their hair. 

It was the camaraderie their youth had never provided. 

Gabriel got to know his brother all over again. This new Michael, who was still solemn, stiff and often too quiet, but could also laugh at himself and did things simply because he wanted to and not because it was expected. 

“Are you knitting?” Gabriel asked, trying to keep his voice neutral when he came home to a tangle of neon green yarn. 

“One of the neurosurgeons swears by it to keep her fingers nimble.” Michael stabbed into the yarn. “It’s too hot here for scarfs, so I figured washcloth to start with.” 

They wound up with a lot of misshapen washcloths and Charlie received a monster of a hat that she claimed to love even though it swallowed her head whole. 

“It’s homemade.” She tugged at the edges. 

Michael and Charlie circled each other warily at first, taking measure. 

“She’s strange.” Michael told Gabriel. 

“He’s boring.” Charlie told Gabriel. 

“Get over it.” He told both of them. And miraculously, they did. 

“She likes black and white movies.” Michael announced triumphantly. “We’re going out, don’t wait up.” 

“I figured out where you got your sarcasm from.” Charlie grinned. “He’s so freakin’ subtle about it that sometimes I wind up snorting over it like five hours later.” 

They all had Christmas dinner at a Chinese food place, Michael footing the bill and ordering enough to keep them in leftovers for a week. They don’t talk about family or reminisce. Charlie told them about the girl she’d met at SCA, Michael recounted a run in with another doctor who couldn’t remember where he’d left a patient and Gabriel...listened. 

On New Year’s, Gabriel went up onto the roof his building alone. Watched the fireworks break overhead like gaudy lightning. Michael came home in the wee hours, rubbing at his eyes and the base of his spine. Too many hours in emergency surgery, leaning over to do delicate work. 

“Come on. The bed is big enough for two for one night.” 

Michael didn’t even argue, stretched out under the blankets and fell asleep before Gabriel could turn off the light. In the morning, they face each other half-awake and heavy lidded with clinging sleep. 

“I ran away.” Michael said softly. “So I could get home again.” 

“Shut up.” Gabriel smiled, reached across the distance and palmed the rise of Michael’s cheek. 

Michael encircled Gabriel’s wrist, not halting the caress. Only taking the measure of it. Then he tugged at him, rolling Gabriel into him until they were spooned together, Michael’s lips soft on the nape of Gabriel’s neck. Shep jumped on the bed and settled at their feet with a satisfied sigh.

Gabriel closed his eyes against the sudden dizziness. All at once, he was leaping from that swing, suspended in the space. For the instant before sleep took him again, he flew.


End file.
